Frankenstein Marketing

How does a company end up with Frankenstein Marketing?

One reasonable purchase at a time. Nobody sets out to build one. It accretes, and every step is sensible on the day it happens.

A competitor's positioning reads well, so it gets adapted. A course teaches a webinar sequence that clearly converts, so it goes in. An operator two categories over has a voice that travels, so the founder starts writing like him. A tool solves a real problem this quarter, so it gets bought. Then the next one. Then the one after that.

Two years on, the company has a marketing function built entirely from things that worked for other people. And no answer to what it's actually for.

The environment makes this the path of least resistance. Scott Brinker’s annual census counted 15,384 martech products in 2025, roughly a hundredfold increase over fifteen years. The supply side offers an effectively unlimited number of individually reasonable parts.

Why does assembling proven marketing tactics still fail?

Because the value sits in how the parts reinforce each other, rather than in the parts themselves. Borrowed parts were built to reinforce somebody else's system. The strongest account of this is thirty years old and wasn't written about marketing at all.

In What Is Strategy? (Harvard Business Review, 1996) Michael Porter made a simple argument. Advantage comes from a system of parts that reinforce each other, rather than from any one part.

Someone asked him what Southwest Airlines' core competence was. He said the question was wrong. The airline's strategy is "a whole system of activities, not a collection of parts."

That sets up the finding that matters here. Porter observed that copying only some parts of a system, without matching the whole, gains you very little. Performance doesn't improve. It can drop.

Sit with that last bit, because it's what explains a plateau. Borrowing parts has a cost. You get something other than a slice of someone else's results. You can end up worse off than a version of your company with fewer, plainer parts that agreed with each other.

Porter gave a reason. A rival rarely matches any single activity perfectly. Across a linked system, those odds multiply. His example: .9 × .9 = .81, and .9 × .9 × .9 × .9 = .66.

The value lives in the joints. You can buy the pieces. The fit isn't for sale.

Jan Rivkin later modeled this formally. In Management Science in 2000 he simulated firms copying a high performer's complex strategy. Small errors produced large penalties. Firms making simple local improvements got stranded on low peaks. He stripped out every other explanation, so complexity alone was doing the work.

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton named the behavioral version casual benchmarking: copying what you can see a high performer doing, without knowing why it works. Their example is United's 1994 "Shuttle by United." It copied Southwest's surface, meaning fast turnarounds, casual dress, one aircraft type. It failed. Southwest's real advantage was how it treated its people, and you can't see that from outside.

The borrowed funnel is the casual dress.

What does Frankenstein Marketing look like from inside the company?

It looks like a marketing function where every piece has a good reason to be there and the whole thing has stopped moving. Four signals show up together: every part has an alibi, the stack has outgrown the strategy, adding more stops helping, and nobody can say plainly what the company is for.

• Every part has an alibi Ask why any single piece exists and there's a good answer. It worked for someone, or a credible person recommended it. Ask why they belong together and the answer thins out.
• The stack outgrew the strategy Gartner’s 2023 survey of 405 marketing leaders found organizations using 33% of their martech stack’s capability, down from 42% the year before and 58% in 2020. Buying accelerated while use collapsed.
• Adding doesn't help any more The response to a plateau is another part. A channel, a tool, an agency. Output rises, results don't. Bain’s research found 85% of executives say the obstacles to profitable growth are internal rather than market conditions.
• The company can't say what it's for Different answers from the founder, the deck, and the website. Porter's phrase for the end state, written in 1996, is hard to improve on: "me-too" or hedged activity configurations, inconsistencies across functions, and organizational dissonance.

Is copying other companies' marketing always a mistake?

No. For a company far from best practice, borrowing works and the evidence is strong. This concept has a scope condition, and stating it is what keeps it honest.

In 2013 Nicholas Bloom and colleagues published a randomised controlled trial in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Those are rare in management research. Large Indian textile firms were randomly given free consulting. It installed 38 standard, off-the-shelf practices, all borrowed from elsewhere.

Productivity rose 17% in the first year. Within three years, those firms had opened more plants.

Generic best practice, moved across with no custom strategy, produced large real gains. Porter conceded the same point. Doing things well is necessary. The hard trade-offs only start to bite once you're near the frontier.

So Frankenstein Marketing is a plateau diagnosis, not a law. A company at half a million in revenue that copies a working funnel will probably grow, and should. The condition describes what happens after competence. The parts are all good, the execution is real, and the growth stops anyway.

There's a second honest caveat. A tightly coherent system can become a rigid one. Nicolaj Siggelkow’s study of Liz Claiborne traced how the same tight internal fit that drove the company's rise later made it unable to adapt. The goal is being coherent about the right thing, rather than coherence for its own sake.

How do you fix Frankenstein Marketing?

By deciding what the system is for, then removing the parts built to serve something else. The repair is subtractive. If the problem were missing parts, the answer would be more parts. The problem is that the parts don't agree with each other, and adding a fifth borrowed piece to four that already disagree deepens the disagreement.

What breaks the pattern is deciding what the system is for, then removing what doesn't serve it. That decision can't be borrowed. Anything available to copy is available to everyone else, which lands you back in the sea of sameness. It has to come from what the company knows that nobody else can claim, which is what the Viral Genius Framework exists to surface.

Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi called the corporate version the coherence premium. Companies win by lining up a clear market position with a few distinctive capabilities and a portfolio that draws on both. Their argument puts the advantage in the alignment rather than in any single element's quality. That's Porter's claim, one level up.

And there is a measurable version. System1’s 2024 analysis with the IPA, covering more than 4,000 ads from 56 brands and £3.3bn of spend, found the most consistent brands produced 27% more very large brand effects, with consistent brands delivering roughly twice the market-share growth at equal media spend. That measures creative consistency rather than whole-system coherence, so treat it as adjacent evidence. It points the same direction, and it is properly sourced, which is more than can be said for the "consistent branding increases revenue 23%" figure that circulates everywhere. That one comes from a vendor survey asking marketers to estimate what consistency might be worth. It measures opinion.

Start with the free Viral Genius Profile

Twelve questions, about ten minutes. It reports which parts of your positioning are yours and which arrived from somewhere else.

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Coined by Fernando Labastida, Viral Genius Institute. The concept has two independent practitioner validations: Russ Somers, who contributed the founder-POV failure-mode ladder behind the Founder POV Maturity Model, and Anna Cummins, whose scaling work produced the case study in Stuck at $4M, a founder who had borrowed his public identity along with the tactics. This is one of three linked terms. The Sea of Sameness is the market condition this produces at scale, and Message Mediocrity is what the assembly actually sounds like to a buyer.